1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved method of combusting a mixture of air and hydrocarbons in a combustion chamber.
Such combustion chamber is to be understood as to be defined by a cylinder and piston arrangement of an internal combustion motor operating in accordance with the Otto process or Diesel process. The combustion chamber is also to be understood as a combustion chamber of a gas turbine installation, of a part of the fossil fired boiler or furnace, resp. of thermal power plants, and of a boiler for heating and/or generating hot water for household use, in apartments and business buildings, etc.
It is generally known in the art that the classical combustion of hydrocarbons such as e.g. fuel oil, gasoline, petrol, butane, propane, etc. is based on a as fine as possible atomization of the hydrocarbon particles in air.
The waste gases formed e.g. during the combustion of fuel oil contain in case of a stoichiometric combustion theoretically exclusively carbon dioxide (CO.sub.2), water vapor (H.sub.2 O), sulphur dioxide (SO.sub.2) as well as nitrogen (N.sub.2), latter being part of the fresh air necessary for such combustion.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In practice, it is however not possible to achieve aforementioned ideal conditions because in spite or as a result, resp. of the combustion with air the exhaust gases emanating from such combustion contain unburned and partially burned fractions, such as carbon (C) in form of soot, carbon monoxide (CO) and various olefins as well as more highly oxidized substances, such as sulphur trioxide (SO.sub.3) and nitrogen hexoxide (NO.sub.3) and, furthermore, ashes formed by impurities and also residual oxygen (O.sub.2).
According to a generally known method the fuel is mixed with water such to form an emulsion, yielding an improved combustion. However, there must be observed specific conditions when mixing the combustion air with such emulsion.
Such method is an improvement over the process with no addition of water, is however still not quite satisfactory with regard to heat produced and pollution control.